The quietly pacifist peaceful
always die
to make room for men
who shout. Who tell lies to
children, and crush the corners
of old men’s dreams.
And now I find your name,
scrawled large in someone’s
blood, on this survival
list.
by Alice Walker
from Her Blue Body Everything We Know
Harvest Books, 1996
Kimberly Przeszlowski in The Conversation:
In 2021, a driver in Albuquerque, New Mexico, ran a red light, striking and killing a 7-year-old and injuring his father. The suspect fled the scene and eventually escaped to Mexico. Using camera footage and cellphone data, the Albuquerque Police Department’s real-time crime center played a crucial role in identifying, apprehending and charging the person at fault. The driver was ultimately sentenced to 27 years in prison, providing a measure of justice to the grieving family.
Real-time crime centers are specialized units within police departments that use the latest technology to monitor public spaces and record incidents. The New York City Police Department was the first to institute a real-time crime center in 2005.
Real-time crime centers often focus on video surveillance, using closed-circuit television systems, license plate scanners, body cameras worn by officers and drone cameras. The centers sometimes also include gunshot detection and computer-aided dispatch systems, live or static facial recognition, cellphone tracking and geolocation data, and access to probation, parole and arrestee information. Police departments are adding the latest innovations, such as video analytics driven by deep learning artificial intelligence, to identify objects and assess subjects’ behavior.
More here.
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Jan H. J. Hoeijmakers in Nature:
We are born; we grow up; we become an adult and perhaps reproduce. Then we might increasingly develop ailments or chronic diseases, before we decline and eventually — inevitably — die. These are the facts of life, at least hitherto, however much many of us might wish for them to be otherwise.
Perhaps things could be different. Progress in ageing research has opened up the prospect that ageing and death might be deferred, possibly even for hundreds of years, according to some people. Is that wishful thinking? The timely, illuminating book Why We Die by 2009 chemistry Nobel co-laureate Venki Ramakrishnan explains the science — and, importantly, separates fact from fiction.
Over the past century or so, better hygiene, improved living conditions and health-care innovations, such as antibiotics and vaccines, have seen human life expectancy more than double. But the maximal lifespan has hit a ceiling at about 120 years.
More here.
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Stephen Holmes at The Ideas Letter:
Today’s disheartening resurgence of authoritarianism, xenophobia, race-baiting, brazen sexism and religious zealotry, not to mention homicidal rampages in the name of ethnic identity, makes rallying to the defense of a beleaguered liberalism into an intellectual and moral imperative. Even Alexander Lefebvre, a delightfully entertaining Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the University of Sidney, acknowledges in an aside that “liberal institutions and values are threatened worldwide.” But his stylishly chatty and evangelizing new book aims to defend liberalism against a threat less grimly consequential than those making newspaper headlines. The danger to which he draws our attention is more bookish and professorial than blood-dimmed and existential. In making his eloquent case for liberalism, he says little about the malignant movements of the far right thriving on political confusion and division in the United States and the European Union. Instead, he concentrates his hostile fire on a fashionable but unjustifiably cramped interpretation of the teachings of his philosophical hero, John Rawls.
The mission he sets himself is to present Rawls’ thought in a new light and thereby overturn “the reigning orthodoxy of how to do political philosophy within the Anglophone academy.”
More here.
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All night the language dog
gnaws at the meaning bone.
Soon the sea begins
to question its shuffling
from east to west, and the stars
their vast, ordinary circuits.
So my friend has fled into his father’s fields.
He leans against a fence
and wonders what the ant means
and the moonlit grasses as they bend
and spread and flow beneath
a wind whose beginning seems obscure
and whose end, uncertain.
He notices that something of himself
has set off with the wind
and that he is now two.
He wonders at this doubleness.
Back home, he sits in the kitchen,
and ordinary boy watching
his mother cook breakfast,
but something of him is in
another place, and some other thing
is with him even here.
by Nils Peterson
from The Dear Time of Our Talking
Frog On The Moon, Small Press, 2020
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Sahana Sitaraman in The Scientist:
When someone catches a lung infection, be it viral or bacterial, they usually show tell-tale symptoms, such as weakness, breathing difficulties, or brain fog. These indicators signal others to keep a safe distance from the contagious individual. But Pseudomonas aeruginosa can cause a range of lung infections, from mild bronchitis to life-threatening pneumonia, that are acutely asymptomatic yet cause inflammation and destruction of tissue.1
In chronic infections, these bacteria form a biofilm of extracellular polymer matrix around themselves that shields them from antimicrobials, enzymes, and neutrophils.2 Now, in a paper published in Cell, a group of scientists investigated the underlying mechanism and reported that the biofilm hides Pseudomonas bacteria from sensory neurons in mice, preventing signals from reaching the brain and reducing sickness symptoms.3 These findings provide a deeper understanding of how biofilm-forming bacteria evade the lung-to-brain communication channel, a potentially crucial tactic in persistent infections.
More here.
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Ari Schulman in The New Atlantis:
Shouldn’t charity serve the needs of recipients, not givers?
Isn’t it better to do more good than less?
Shouldn’t there be some way to measure that?
Effective altruism is the philosophy that answers “yes” to all these questions. Put this way, it sounds entirely innocuous. So why was it one of the hottest ideas in tech circles in the 2010s? And why is it playing a central role in so many Silicon Valley controversies of the 2020s?
If we use headlines as our guide, effective altruism has fallen from grace. One of its leaders, Eliezer Yudkowsky, also a founder of AI safety research, notoriously called in Time last year for global limits on AI development that are enforceable by airstrikes on rogue data centers. Sam Bankman-Fried claimed it as a motive for what turned out to be his multi-billion-dollar fraud. It reportedly drove board members of OpenAI to fire Sam Altman over concerns that he wasn’t taking AI safety seriously enough, a few days before some of them were pushed out in turn. And it has spurred the pro-AI backlash movement of “effective accelerationism,” which regards effective altruism as the second coming of Ted Kaczynski.
In public view, effective altruism shows up as a force of palace intrigue in the halls of Silicon Valley. And it is losing the favor of the court.
More here.
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Julian Nowogrodzki in Nature:
At least one-quarter of people who have severe brain injuries and cannot respond physically to commands are actually conscious, according to the first international study of its kind1.
Although these people could not, say, give a thumbs-up when prompted, they nevertheless repeatedly showed brain activity when asked to imagine themselves moving or exercising.
“This is one of the very big landmark studies” in the field of coma and other consciousness disorders, says Daniel Kondziella, a neurologist at Rigshospitalet, the teaching hospital for Copenhagen University.
The results mean that a substantial number of people with brain injuries who seem unresponsive can hear things going on around them and might even be able to use brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) to communicate, says study leader Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.
More here.
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Timo Schaefer in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
In 1979, most Latin American countries were ruled by right-wing military dictatorships. The Cuban Revolution was 20 years old, and copycat guerrilla groups had been comprehensively defeated across the region thanks in part to heavy United States counterinsurgency efforts. The flame of revolution appeared to be spent. It was in this unpropitious regional context, in the small Central American nation of Nicaragua, that the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberal Front, FSLN), the guerrilla group known colloquially as the Sandinistas, overthrew the brutal, United States–backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. It would turn out to be the last of Latin America’s Cold War revolutions. But for a moment, the Sandinistas’ feat returned hope to a battered socialist Left in the region.
How were the Sandinistas able to achieve victory when so many other guerrilla groups had failed? According to Mateo Jarquín’s intriguing The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History (2024), a big part of the answer has to do with how the Sandinistas leveraged international diplomacy.
More here.
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Richard Brody at The New Yorker:
Gena Rowlands, who died last Wednesday, at the age of ninety-four, is, of all the actresses I’ve ever seen onscreen, the greatest artist. She’s the one whose performances offer the most surprises, the most shocks, the most moment-to-moment inventiveness, and, above all, the most almost-unbearable force of emotional expression, combining extremes of strength and vulnerability, of overt display and inner life. Her mighty talent is also a peculiar one, the strangeness of which is exemplary of the art of movies: it might never have come so fully to light were it not for her marriage to John Cassavetes and for the movies that they made together—especially the personal six that extend from “Faces” (filmed in 1965, released in 1968) to “Love Streams” (1984).
That’s not at all to diminish Rowlands’s art or its basis in her innate talent and hard work, but to locate its essence in the nature of cinema: it’s an art of collaboration, in which more or less every major artistic advance has resulted from two or more people making common cause.
more here.
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Mariana Lenharo in Nature:
When Devin Singh was a paediatric resident, he attended to a young child who had gone into cardiac arrest in the emergency department after a prolonged wait to see a doctor. “I remember doing CPR on this patient and feeling that kiddo slip away,” he says. Devastated by the child’s death, Singh remembers wondering whether a shorter waiting time could have prevented it.
The incident convinced him to combine his paediatric expertise with his other speciality — computer science — to see whether artificial intelligence (AI) might help to cut waiting times. Using emergency-department triage data from the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto, Canada, where Singh currently works, he and his colleagues built a collection of AI models that provide potential diagnoses and indicate which tests will probably be required. “If we can predict, for example, that a patient has a high likelihood of appendicitis and needs an abdominal ultrasound, we can automate ordering that test almost instantly after a patient arrives, rather than having them wait 6–10 hours to see a doctor,” he says.
More here.
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Ari Schulman at The New Atlantis:
But then there are the parts of effective altruism that are just … weird.
For many of its adherents, EA is not just an idea but a transformational lifestyle. There is no limit to how much of your time, money, and identity you can give over to it. EA is intertwined with the rationalist movement, so much so that they are virtually synonyms, different faces of the same set of thinkers, ideas, and organizations. There are formalized online communities. There are in-person meetups. For $3,900 a pop, you can attend four-day-long rationality training workshops at the Bay-area Center for Applied Rationality. Or you can just read up on what Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose work helped inspire the seminars, calls “The Way” of rationality: “The Way is a precise Art. Do not walk to the truth, but dance. On each and every step of that dance your foot comes down in exactly the right spot. Each piece of evidence shifts your beliefs by exactly the right amount, neither more nor less.” Yudkowsky, currently enjoying a moment as the world’s leading expert on AI safety research, was once better known for his FanFiction.net magnum opus Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which spans nearly twice the length of Anna Karenina.
more here.
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Pito, I say
The wine does flow
And Pito says, it does
flow under the bridge
and the barges do flow
on it, and the wine
does flow
and the world flows away
Sure, I say
that’s how it is
and Diane Arbus, I say
have you dreamt of her
lately
Lately as not, says Pito
I dream of her constantly
I don’t know if it’s real
or not, he says
I envy you, I say
And you with real women, he says
She’s just a dream
woman, he says
It’s all a dream, I say
Life is all dreams, I say
And Diane, I say
How is it with her
It’s good, Pito says, it’s good
Is that real, I say
It’s as real as a dream can be
Pito says
by Leo Romero
from After Aztlan
David R. Godine, Publisher, 1992
George Scialabba in The Hedgehog Review:
In 1884, William James began his celebrated essay “The Dilemma of Determinism” by begging his readers’ indulgence: “A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard.” James persisted and rendered the subject very juicy, as he always did. But if the topic appeared exhausted to most people then, surely a hundred and forty years later there can’t be anything new to say. Whole new fields of physics, biology, mathematics, and medicine have been invented—surely this ancient philosophical question doesn’t still interest anyone?
Indeed, it does; it retains for many what James called “the most momentous importance.” Like other hardy perennials—the objectivity of “good”; the universality of truth; the existence of human nature and its telos—it continues to fascinate philosophers and laypersons, who agree only that the stakes are enormous: “our very humanity,” many of them insist.
Why so momentous?
More here.
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Zoltan Nagy in The Conversation:
I’m an engineer who studies and develops smart buildings. My lab created Merlin, which learns how people use energy in their homes and adjust energy controls like thermostats to meet their needs while at the same time minimizing the impact on the grid. The system can learn on one set of buildings and occupants and be used in buildings with different controls and energy use patterns.
We dubbed it Merlin after King Arthur’s legendary magician to reflect the magical nature of the system: It automatically collects data on how people use energy in their homes and identifies opportunities to charge and discharge home battery storage. And it does so in a way that you always have power for whatever you need. So your air conditioning is always available, but at the same time it reduces the strain on the grid – for example, during afternoon peaks.
More here.
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